Big Guy on Experiment X: 36 Days in

It’s day 36, and I figured I’d give a site update since there has been at least one big change since our last update. First off, we have still been putting out at least one piece of content a day! Please let us know if there are things you want to see, or things you want to see more or less of. Below is the same format as before with updated results. And, as always, you can find the running totals in the Experiment X Stats page up top. If you’d like to compare this to the last update, you can find that at: Big Guy on Experiment X – 22nd Day Update.

Costs

We were having some slowness issues with the site under our old hosting company, Namecheap. I would still recommend them as a domain registrar, but for now, I cannot recommend them for web hosting. One of their EasyWP product managers was communicating with me along the way, and it sounds like they are working to make EasyWP a fantastic product in the future. I hope that they are successful as I really love Namecheap. They refunded me for the 1 year that I purchased up front, and I didn’t even ask for it.

We are now hosted at DreamHost, and I am very pleased with the performance so far. It costs quite a bit more than the last hosting option, but I also bought a 3 year plan (we aren’t going anywhere!). If you want to read more about it, see Big Guy. New Digs.

What’s in a Theme?

If you read the last update, you may remember I mentioned that I purchased a theme from themeforest.net but had so many issues that I had to remove it. Well, I FINALLY got my refund approved, but they gave me site credit. I found a theme called Paperback that I like way better than anything we’ve used so far!

Let There Be Content

As I’ve mentioned in the last couple of updates, we occasionally look to Fiverr to get some content to supplement our efforts. I’ve had a couple more of those this time around but haven’t posted them yet.

If you haven’t heard of Fiverr, it is a platform that anyone can use to setup a gig and charge money for that gig, and Fiverr gets a small cut of any sales. We received a pretty good write-up on what it’s like to work though Fiverr from someone on Fiverr. If you haven’t seen it, you can check that out at: Big Guy on Fiverr.

Google Adwords

I’ve still got some of the 100 dollar credit that they gave me left over since I lowered my max pay per click to ten cents. We’ve only received 2 clicks out of 419 impressions at these rates. In the future I may look more into a marketing campaign here, but it is still very expensive for the little traffic that you get… Maybe I’m doing it wrong though.

Branding

The artist I’m working with got me our first draft updates on possible logo options! I’m really excited to get to a finished product and start using it!

Income

Still not “making it rain” :). The site has made about 12 cents in ad revenue since the last update. We have a few affiliate links that we use on things that we review, but I don’t think those have produced any funds for anyone yet.

More of a drizzle…

If you don’t know what Google Adsense is, it’s the platform that allows us to post ads that you will see throughout the site, like this one:

Click Me

For those keeping track, below is what our Costs vs Income looks like here at bigguyonstuff.com.

Item

Cost/Earned ($)

Web Hosting and Domain

-9.06

Amazon Key post from Fiverr.

-25

Five future posts from Fiverr.

-25

Google Adsense

+6.79

Daylight Saving Time Post

-11

Working Through Fiverr Post

-11

Big Guy on Flu Shots

-16

Google Adsense

+5.60

Logo Art - Up Front

-100

Namecheap EasyWP refund

+9.06

DreamHost (3 yr)

-286.20

Google Adsense

+.12

Total

-461.69

That’s it folks. It’s moving along, and we actually have quite a few people viewing our content. If you check out the Experiment X Stats page, we have laid out a few more details that may be interesting to some.

As always, we would love any comments. You may know something that will help us out, or we may be able to help you out. Please reach out. I plan on writing more about how to actually start with building a website or a blog in the future. See you next time!

If you’re starting your own blog, here are the deals we can offer through Namecheap and DreamHost